rience of his public life, his profound
knowledge of international law and the diplomatic history of his own and
other countries, his well-earned reputation as a statesman and
constitutional lawyer, not only at home, but wherever our country has
relations of amity and commerce, the honorable distinction which he
enjoys of having held a foremost place in the great conflict between
freedom and slavery, union and rebellion, all mark him as the man for the
occasion. There seems, indeed, a certain propriety in assigning to the
man who struck the heaviest blows at secession and slavery in the
national Senate the first place under him who, in the field, made them
henceforth impossible. The great captain and the great senator united in
war should not be dissevered in peace.

I am not unaware that there are some, even in the Republican party, who
have failed to recognize in Senator Sumner the really wise and practical
statesmanship which a careful review of his public labors cannot but make
manifest. It is only necessary to point such to the open record of his
senatorial career. Few men have had the honor of introducing and
defending with exhaustive ability and thoroughness so many measures of
acknowledged practical importance to his immediate constituents, the
country at large, and the wider interests of humanity and civilization.
In what exigency has he been found wanting? What legislative act of
public utility for the last eighteen years has lacked his encouragement?
At the head of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, his clearness of vision,
firmness, moderation, and ready comprehension of the duties of his time
and place must be admitted by all parties. It was shrewdly said by Burke
that "men are wise with little reflection and good with little self-
denial, in business of all times except their own." But Charles Sumner,
the scholar, loving the "still air of delightful studies," has shown
himself as capable of thoroughly comprehending and digesting the events
transpiring before his eyes as of pronouncing judgment upon those
recorded in history. Far in advance of most of his contemporaries, he
saw and enunciated the true doctrine of reconstruction, the early
adoption of which would have been of incalculable service to the country.
One of the ablest statesmen and jurists of the Democratic party has had
the rare magnanimity to acknowledge that in this matter the Republican
senator was right, and himself and his party wrong